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Kali Wallace

Författare till Shallow Graves

14+ verk 885 medlemmar 58 recensioner

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Inkluderar namnet: kaliwallace

Foto taget av: Jessica Hilt, 2015

Verk av Kali Wallace

Shallow Graves (2016) 322 exemplar
Salvation Day (2019) 199 exemplar
Dead Space (2021) 181 exemplar
The Memory Trees (2017) 76 exemplar
City of Islands (2018) 61 exemplar
Hunters of the Lost City (2022) 20 exemplar
Last Train to Jubilee Bay (2013) 10 exemplar
The Day They Came 1 exemplar

Associerade verk

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015 Edition (2015) — Bidragsgivare — 68 exemplar
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5 (2020) — Bidragsgivare — 53 exemplar
The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on tor.com (2013) — Bidragsgivare — 38 exemplar
Clarkesworld: Year Eight (2016) — Bidragsgivare — 18 exemplar
Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 40, No. 12 [December 2016] (2016) — Bidragsgivare — 17 exemplar
Clarkesworld: Year Seven (2015) — Bidragsgivare — 13 exemplar
Clarkesworld: Issue 091 (April 2014) (2014) — Bidragsgivare — 11 exemplar
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 22 • March 2012 (2012) — Bidragsgivare — 11 exemplar
Clarkesworld Year Nine: Volume One (2018) — Bidragsgivare — 8 exemplar
Shimmer 2015: The Collected Stories (2016) — Bidragsgivare — 4 exemplar
Sisterhood: Dark Tales and Secret Histories (2018) — Bidragsgivare — 3 exemplar

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Recensioner

I started Shallow Graves hoping for something original and dark but ready to be disappointed because I’m decades away from the target audience for YA novels. Kali Wallace exceeded my hopes and gave me a book that was original, thoughtful, beautifully written and where the darkness was laced with the possibility of a kind of happiness.

The first thing that struck me about Shallow Graves was the strength of the writing. I'm going to go through the first few paragraphs to show you what I mean.

The opening line is a classic:

"The first time I killed a man it was an accident."

That grabbed my attention both because it made me wonder how you kill a man by accident and because it sounded like there was a next time and that the next time wasn't accidental.

Then I learned about the man she killed:

"He didn't have any identification on him. He was white, probably in his mid-fifties. Average build, average height. Smoker. No tattoos or distinguishing scars. His fingerprints matched those found at a thirty-year-old crime scene in North Dakota; a family murder, both parents, son and two daughters, all killed one night at the dinner table. No one was ever arrested."

I loved the disappassionate way the man's true nature was revealed. He's the first monster in a book full of monsters. His low-key introduction was the first indication that, once your eyes are opened to them, you'll find monsters everywhere.

By the end of the next three paragraphs, I was hooked.

The first describes how the dead man was found:

"A real estate agent with the unfortunate name of Poppy Treasure found him three days after I killed him. She opened the back door of an empty house to air it out before her clients arrived and there he was, facedown, on the lawn, dead. The police released a description and pleaded for information, but nobody came forward. Nobody admitted to seeing him. They didn't even know how he had gotten to Evanston, much less how or why he had ended up dead in the yard of a foreclosed house in the Backlot. There wasn't a mark on him. The Medical Examiner blamed the death on a heart attack but the "unusual circumstances" of where he was found made them suspicious."

I admired the way this paragraphbuilds the tension and the weirdness factor while starting to establish an intimacy between the reader on the narrator, That "There wasn't a mark on him" showed me that this was no simple accidental killing and the "unusual circumstances" told me that I didn't have all the facts yet, while making me keen to learn them. The remark about the real estate agent's name adds a dash of personality and humour that made me want to like the narrator rather than think of them as a killer.

The next paragraph increased my empathy and again pushed up the weirdness.

"They meant my grave. There was a hole in the backyard of that empty house, about five feet long and eighteen inches deep. and in that hole they found hair, blood, fibres. Everything I left behind was too degraded for identification purposes. That's what you become when you die but you don't manage to do it properly: too degraded."

I love how that paragraph confirms that the narrator is dead, which is strange enough, and also suggests that they feel some blame for not dying "properly" and ending up in a "degraded" state.

The next paragraph established the relationship I, the reader, was going to have with the narrator and made me keen to learn more:

"This is how I killed him."

This sentence told me that I would be Breezy's confessor/confidant and that she was telling me her story so that she could understand it better.

I admired Kali Wallace's ability to write intriguing, thoughtful prose that was convincingly the voice of a seventeen-year-old girl. It was the quality of that voice that kept Breezy Lin's humanity at the heart of the story.

One of the things that makes Shallow Graves work so well is that Breezy's main challenge is to work out not just what she has become but who she is going to be. When she rises from her grave, a year after her death, she makes her first kill on instinct. She doesn't understand how or why she does what she does. She doesn't know what she's become.

The traditional horror route would have been to cast Breezy as a revenant version of an Onryō, rising from her grave driven by a hunger for vengeance against men who murder women. Breezy has the power to do this. She can feel the urge to use that power growing inside her. What made Shallow Graves powerful for me was that Breezy resists this urge, not because it's wrong but because she's mourning the life that her murderer ripped away from her. She knows she can't go back to her family but she aches to be with them. She knows that her long-held dream of being an astronaut, which she's trained for her whole life, is now out of her reach. She knows she can't be the woman she would have become and the loss devastates her.

Her first thought is to seek a cure for what happened to her so she can find a way back to being the girl her murderer destroyed. This leads her on a journey to find people who are or who understand the supernatural. She falls into the clutches of a cult that promises to cure her. She finds allies in unlikely places. She goes through an ordeal finally to meet with a supernatural being who can tell her what she is and how she can be cured.

Some of this journey worked well, especially the early contact with the cult but I felt that the plot meandered a little too much in the middle section of the book. I loved the ending and the choices that Breezy made.

Shallow Graves isn't horrifying in the slasher/gorefest kind of way. Its horror comes from understanding how much destruction men cause when they kill women and girls and how often they do it and that so many of them get away with it. For me, Breezy's sense of loss, even after she rises from her grave into a second life, had the biggest emotional impact.
… (mer)
½
 
Flaggad
MikeFinnFiction | 21 andra recensioner | Nov 12, 2023 |
Oh man. Everything I want from a space horror — including politics and a mystery. Is there more where this came from??
 
Flaggad
lyrrael | 8 andra recensioner | Aug 3, 2023 |
I'm a huge fan of science fiction and a decent fan of murder mysteries, and I'm beginning to realize how much I enjoy the merging of these two genres. For me Dead Space contained a lot of what I liked about both genres, and only a little of what I don't care for as much.

In terms of science fiction: it has the futuristic setting, the multi-planet spanning plot, the space stations and outer space exploration, the fusing and man and machine, and the excitement of artificial intelligence.

In terms of murder mysteries: it has, well, the mysterious murder, the cast of suspicious characters, the red herrings, the betrayals, and the numerous twists and turns.

The author does a good job of developing the characters and building the world(s) around them. I especially liked the Protagonist (a brilliant scientist-turned-lowly-security officer who struggles with her past defining her future), the Investigator (an calm and commanding Martian with a complex past I would love to learn more about), and the Lawyer (a disagreeable rich boy who actually has a heart of gold, er maybe bronze).

The book also engages with a lot of interesting concepts, including unchecked capitalism, corporate enslavement, scientific exploration, and the pros/cons of artificial intelligence. Even being set so far in the future, it felt a little too close to home with its portrayal of greedy, insensitive corporations and Earth as an uncouth antagonist of other worlds and species.

My main complaint is the overwhelming amount of exposition. Though a lot of the details relate to the characters and the setting, they still came across as bloated and overdone. Exposition is par for the course with science fiction, but here it just felt like much too much. Also, I had some minor quibbles with comically overdone action sequences involving robotic spiders.

Overall there's a lot to like here, from the compelling characters to the scenes of brutal violence to the surprising plot twists. There's also a nice bit of representation of the LGBTQ community and persons with disabilities, which was refreshing. It's a character-driven space murder mystery with elements of horror, and the second half especially had my flying through the pages.

(3.5 stars rounded up for Goodreads)
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Reading_Vicariously | 11 andra recensioner | May 22, 2023 |
I've read one of Kali Wallace's previous YA books, [b:Shallow Graves|22663629|Shallow Graves|Kali Wallace|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1434989166l/22663629._SY75_.jpg|42162445], about a teenage girl who wakes up after being murdered and discovers she can see auras around bad people, leading her into a paranormal world she never knew existed. I thought it was great so when I saw that this book was coming out I was totally willing to give it a chance, perhaps even eager.

Salvation Day is Wallace's first adult novel and boy, is it a ride. Set many centuries in Earth's future, it takes a lot of my favourite science-fiction tropes and uses them all with aplomb. The blending of action and politics elevated the story beyond a simple 'abandoned spaceship is more dangerous than it appears' plot; it gives depth to the characters and their motivations, and creates an imaginable future as a result.

The book alternates perspectives between Zahra Dove Lago, a disenfranchised young woman angry at how her father was scapegoated after a massacre, and Jaswinder Battacharya, a post-graduate student and only survivor of the aforementioned massacre. Zahra is part of a desert cult that believes the site of the massacre, an abandoned ship floating in space, is perfect for their family of exiles and refugees - they just need Jaswinder to open the ship. Everything starts to go wrong from there, as hostages never behave themselves and neither do the long-dead corpses of the massacre.

To start with there's no romance, it's far more of a sci-fi action-horror story, but Jas' unrequited love for his best friend, Baqir, is a driving force for him. So there's a tiny bit of gay content. Jaswinder is a great character, thoughtful and full of compassion, but deeply haunted by the violence he's seen and the losses he's endured. Likewise Zahra is another interesting character. She's determined and desperate to prove herself to the leader of her group, she thinks well on her feet and is also driven by the pain of the losses she's endured.

I just really enjoyed it. I even teared up a bit at the end. Despite taking place hundreds of years in the future, the characters are very human and recognizable, easy to sympathize with and connect to, which is essential to me as a reader.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
xaverie | 8 andra recensioner | Apr 3, 2023 |

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Statistik

Verk
14
Även av
14
Medlemmar
885
Popularitet
#28,944
Betyg
½ 3.7
Recensioner
58
ISBN
36
Språk
1

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